Not asking about torrents (I know their gone), how will I buy/download visual novels now?

[Whiztle]

It would be great if the pages for the visual novels, for example: Swan Song could now show a link to where to purchase it and if the site is in Japanese, maybe a navigation guide and installation/patching guide as well.

 

Before I could go to fuwanovel, find a wide range of visual novels to download. The games came prepatched, installation was easy and for each individual title there was a troubleshooting guide, so doing things like changing system locale was a breeze.

 

Now I am kinda lost and it really seems daunting. "Where do I buy x game?" "How do I navigate this site? I don't understand Japanese" "Where can I find translation files?" "How do I patch the game?".

 

I know others relate to this. To stay true to your motto. Please put in some effort to make purchasing/downloading visual novels more accessible, for the people that is not so internet/tech savvy.

 

♥

 

[Zenophilious]

Mentioned torrents in title, b&

 

VNDB pretty much has all the sites you can buy VNs.  Just look at the language versions, click on the version you're interested in, and then click on the "Official website" link.  There are two versions of Swan Song, the Low Price Edition and the Download Edition.  I'd recommend putting the text into Google Translate or something similar, since they don't seem to have an English version of the site, but that kind of makes sense, since, you know, you're buying the Japanese version.  Aside from that, I don't really know what to say.  I don't really think it's fair to expect someone to go through and translate entire webpages that could change at any time.

 

If you don't want to go through all that hassle and are okay with owning a physical copy of the game, use Ren's visual novel ordering thread.

 

That's all I can suggest.

[Darklord Rooke]

Now I am kinda lost and it really seems daunting. "Where do I buy x game?" "How do I navigate this site? I don't understand Japanese" "Where can I find translation files?" "How do I patch the game?".

 

A lot of your concerns will be addressed on the new site (which is coming.) There's a ton of effort going into it, but unfortunately people are busy and so things are a little slow right now.

[Whiztle]

Good to know their addressing those concerns.

 

In my frustration I kinda forgot that vndb has all the links and navigating Dlsite wasn't hard (but this thread was more for others that might struggle, but the post looked better when using myself as an example).

 

Hopefully the patching process gets a lot of focus. The best guide I could find, had too little pictures.

 

New site hype~~

[Zalor]

It would be great if the pages for the visual novels, for example: Swan Song could now show a link to where to purchase it and if the site is in Japanese, maybe a navigation guide and installation/patching guide as well.

 

Before I could go to fuwanovel, find a wide range of visual novels to download. The games came prepatched, installation was easy and for each individual title there was a troubleshooting guide, so doing things like changing system locale was a breeze.

 

Funny you should mention Swan Song, as I remember a few months ago using that as an example for why we should keep torrents for unlicensed titles. The short answer is that purchasing Swan Song (and many other fan tld VNs for that matter) is near impossible, and you will just have to find a another place to pirate it. I would also highly encourage it as well, because Swan Song is a fantastic title. 

 

The reason importing VNs from Japan is so difficult is because not only do you have to navigate a Japanese website, but often they won't/can't ship outside of Japan. So you'll need to get somebody else to buy it for you who is in Japan, and then have them ship it to you. Yeah, it's bullshit. 

[Nosebleed]

dlsite is always your first bet when it comes to games.

Though the site is in Japanese you can get around it pretty easily.

Getchu is also a good alternative.

Indeed we'll try to have information on how to buy as many visual novels as possible on the new website.

For now though if you want one game in particular you'll need to ask about it.

[Beato]

Funny you should mention Swan Song, as I remember a few months ago using that as an example for why we should keep torrents for unlicensed titles. The short answer is that purchasing Swan Song (and many other fan tld VNs for that matter) is near impossible, and you will just have to find a another place to pirate it. I would also highly encourage it as well, because Swan Song is a fantastic title. 

 

The reason importing VNs from Japan is so difficult is because not only do you have to navigate a Japanese website, but often they won't/can't ship outside of Japan. So you'll need to get somebody else to buy it for you who is in Japan, and then have them ship it to you. Yeah, it's bullshit. 

...You can buy Swan Song digitally on dl site and it works with the english patch so I have no idea why you'd think that. Now there are some titles that are pretty much impossible to buy, like the original dvd version of Muv-Luv and Alternative (Though the reprint version supposedly also works with the patch, the w7 ver however does not), YU-NO or the windows ver of F/SN Realta Nua (which is the best version of F/SN with the best patch so it's kinda sad that we might not be able to suggest people the better release).